Daily Archives: October 22, 2012

One of Owen’s best buddies, Sam, turned three this past weekend. And we learned a very important lesson. Read on…

The party began with a LOT of jumping and giggling. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but balloons make a birthday party. I’ve never seen anything like it. Give some preschoolers a totally empty (padded?) room with a dozen helium balloons and let them go to town, and you’ve got the recipe for the BEST! BIRTHDAY! EVAH!

And then they continued with more jumping on Sam’s new big boy bed.

…and some more jumping around in Sam’s castle. Owen crawled right in and shouted, “I’M A DRAGON!!!”. Oh how I love the enthusiasm of a toddler pretending.

(The castle was no match for Owen’s overzealous jumping/climbing). Don’t worry, no toddlers were harmed in the breaking of this building.

Then they stopped jumping for a few minutes to eat some lunch.

It was one of our first experiences with not allowing Owen to have the food everyone else was eating due to his wheat allergy/gluten intolerance/celiac. I’ll do another allergy update on this again soon, but recent evidence has made us change our minds about the “Oh, he can have some wheat when we’re out and about” attitude, and moved us back into “totally gluten free” territory. I thought he’d be upset about not being able to have nuggets (which he adores), but he was totally cool with having something else. I even brought him homemade gluten free chocolate chip cookies to have instead of cake/cupcakes, and rather than feeling left out, I think he felt special. Phew, crisis averted.

And now for the lesson we learned.

When we were ready for the birthday piece de resistance — blowing out the birthday candles, Owen, ever the spotlight hog, dashed over from across the room and blew out Sam’s candle before he could get to it! He actually did it before any of us really knew what was happening — I was snapping pictures, totally unaware of the renegade candle blowing that was about to happen.

That little stinker! To his credit, I’m going to bet he had no idea that it wasn’t a nice thing to do. Egocentricity is the basis of toddlerhood, after all, and I imagine all he was thinking was how fun it was to be the center of attention at his birthday party.

Still, there were tears. And understandably so. After the parents all had a good laugh (poor Sam!), the candles were lit again and we all sang again and Sam got his moment to shine.

And I added yet another thing to the list of “things I never expected to have to teach my kid”.

Suffice to say Owen was pooped after all of that attention stealing and I got a quiet ride home and a nice, long nap.

Oh, and his chubby little hands haven’t let go of that balloon since Saturday afternoon. He’s been carrying it around our house like it’s his prized possession. Remind me of that next time I need a cheap way to keep my kid happy for a week.